cannery operated by two of his brothers. In 1867, when Hume was 22, he and his brothers, who had moved north to Oregon, opened the first cannery on the Columbia River near Astoria. In 1869 he married Celia Bryant, with whom he had two children. The first, a girl, died while still a baby. The second, a boy, died at age 4 in 1875, and Celia Hume died shortly thereafter. Celia and the two children were buried in Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland. Although Hume had prospered, buying several Columbia River canneries between 1872 and 1876, when his wife and children died, he sold most of his holdings and returned to San Francisco. There he bought a steamer, the Alexander Duncan, and searching for new purpose in life, traveled north along the Oregon coast. While visiting Ellensburg (later renamed Gold Beach), he decided to buy a salmon fishery near the mouth of the Rogue River in Curry County. There in late 1876, "he took up his career once again in one of the most isolated and desolate sections of the Pacific Coast". Lower Rogue empire After building a cannery, warehouse, bunkhouse, mess hall, and other buildings and hiring fishermen, Hume opened his salmon business in 1877. He acquired ownership of all the tidelands along both sides of the lowermost of the river; this gave him virtual control of fish populations migrating between the ocean and spawning beds upstream. Over the next 32 years, Hume's company caught, processed, and shipped hundreds of tons of salmon from the Rogue. Meanwhile, he remarried and expanded his business interests to include a store, hatchery, hotel, saloon, and sawmill, and other enterprises involving shipping, a newspaper (the Gold Beach Gazette), real estate, and ranching. After a fire destroyed the hatchery and several other Hume buildings in 1893, he moved many of his holdings to the opposite side of the river, where he founded the city of Wedderburn in 1895, naming it "in honor of the ancestral castle of the Humes of Scotland". Floating some of his unburned buildings to Wedderburn from Ellensburg, he added a new hatchery, offices, a new home, many other buildings, and a horse-racing track. He started another newspaper, the Wedderburn Radium, and applied successfully for a post office, which opened in 1898 and was run by a Hume employee in Hume's general store. As his businesses grew, he added to his